39 – sleepy
Hey Folks. This week we talk about choice. The types we have as gamers in a game session, the various levels of impact they can have on games, and the other little bits we discover during our slightly rambling conversation.

2 comments

I agree about the comment concerning interesting. As soon as I read it I realized my error. I was going more for the idea of how I dislike zero sum actions especially if the mechanics of the game are engaged. This goes along with your idea of how you don’t want the fun/adventure to stop.

On negative and positive options or outcomes I think you can have situations occur where the possible results or all negative or all positive but choosing them is the fun part. The problems come into play when you start stringing the outcomes together. Get to many negative outcomes and the players feel like they’re being pooped on by the GM. Get to many positive outcomes and the game feels like a fun sunny day with little to no chance for meaningful conflict. I would suggest checking out Hamlets Hit Points by Robin Laws to see a far more in depth explanation of what I’m sure I didn’t do very much justice.

Alex Swingle

As the great Robert Jordan once said, this episode was ‘choice’. There was an abuse on using the term interesting due to the fact that interesting is an internal evaluator. Meaning what you think is interesting isn’t as….interesting as you think for another person. I’m more in the camp of negative is negative and positive is positive. There is a scale and it is more important in my eyes to know how to measure it. The only caveat for me is knowing reactions don’t have to stop the adventure/fun. It just means you or the players may have to do something else to get what you/they want.

Every choice can be a game-changer if you let it be one. You may have already touched on it but when you used the thieves’ guild as an example, talking to the barkeep doesn’t stop you from talking to the guild. You can make the barkeep be a member of that guild and still sneak that message across to advance the players into getting what they want accomplished. Just a small example of what I mean behind allowing choices to be as massive or shallow as you want them to be.